First Love by Kathleen

First Love

by Kathleen

My sister told me that the sounds of the leaves being ripped and torn is the cry of their sadness, their pain — and yet, when I think of my first love I think of those leaves. Verdure. The smell of pine. The feeling of life, of leaves in my hands and the sun shining. Life. Love has been elusive since those first thoughts of leaves.

My sister also told me that the elves lived behind the trees, in the shadows of the sun on leaves. Magical and somehow eternal. Is this what love should feel like? Lost in the pines, walking on a soft bed of leaves protected with the sunshine always ahead, peaking through the leaf-laden limbs of trees?

My first love doesn’t exist in a physical form — it exists in fits and spurts of sunshine. A smile, someone I let step behind the trees with me in the sunshine — alone in the magic of eternity.